Jake frowned, shrugging. “I don’t know how many were in the cars.”
The cop nodded, pointing down the beach. “There’s another puddle of blood there, bigger than the one by the car. Who the hell killed these guys?”
“I don’t know,” said Jake.
He shivered from the rain and wind and shock. Slipping his hands into his pants pockets, his fingers wrapped around the chain he’d ripped from José Torrio’s throat, and he lifted it to his face. A beveled stone the color of fresh blood was attached to the chain with a gold jeweler’s mount. Jake stared at it, wondering what impulse had caused him to safeguard the bauble through the murderous events of the past few minutes.
“You must have a real guardian angel,” said the cop, grinning sarcastically. He jerked on the corpse’s arm again, and it came away from the torso. The cop whistled under his breath as his partner caught hold of the corpse’s lapel and continued dragging the body toward the beach. “You ever seen anybody get fucked up this bad?”
“What’s that?” whispered Jake.
“I asked if you’d ever seen anybody this fucked up.”
“Not in a long time.”
He shoved the necklace into the pocket of his jacket and turned away, heading back toward the beach.
Run away, Jake. Run away.
HE STORM BLEW OVER BEFORE DARK, leaving the smell of ozone in the air and brilliant stars dangling from a sheet of black crepe. It had taken the rest of the day and half the night before both the Galveston and Houston Police were done questioning Jake. Both departments wondered just what the hell he thought he was doing meeting with Reever alone, and how eight men ended up dead, four shot so many times they looked like sieves. Jake had no reasonable answer—which bothered him as much as it did anyone else. But what bothered him worse was the explosion of violence itself. He couldn’t get the thought out of his head that he was somehow responsible for it.
If he had planned the meeting better, at a more public location, then José wouldn’t have dared try the hit. If he had informed Cramer beforehand, his partner would never have okayed the meeting. If . . .
By three in the morning he was well into his third double Scotch when he heard the lock clicking on the front door. A bottle of pain pills rested unopened on the glass-topped table beside him, and the liquor hadn’t yet dulled his senses, not nearly as much as he wanted it to. He could see the brightly lit interior of his apartment reflected in the liquor bottle so he didn’t turn, just glanced at the Glock, resting in a box beside the liquor.
“Hello, Cramer,” he said, as his partner sauntered out onto the balcony.
Jake could have bounced a baseball off Cramer’s frown as the man dropped into the other lawn chair like a giant cannonball. His face looked as though it had been carved out of black granite, then shot head-on with a bowlful of dry Grape-Nuts, and he was so dark people said the whites of his eyes blinded them. A tough, streetwise cop, he bore not one but three bullet scars from separate encounters with what he called “percolators.” Jake expected to hear some homespun Cajun platitudes, but tonight Cramer was in plain-speak mode.
“Nice,” said Cramer, staring at the bottle and the painkillers. “I could have been one of the Torrios for all you knew, and you’d be too messed up to do anything but smile while I blew your stupid head off.”
Jake shook his head. “I’m sticking to Scotch. And to my knowledge none of the Torrios’ men has a key.”
“New piece?” said Cramer, nudging the pistol with a finger the size of a hand-rolled cigar.
“Backup gun.”
“Goddamn it, Jake! That meeting was about the stupidest fucking stunt you’ve pulled since I’ve known you.”
Jake shrugged. “You still look a little peaked.”
“I’ll give you peaked, you sonofabitch. If you don’t want to be partners just say so.”
“I never said I didn’t want to be partners. You’re the only friend I’ve got,” admitted Jake, discovering that it was hard to mouth the words.
Cramer hesitated. “Then act like it. What the hell were you doing down there alone?”
Jake shook his head. “You were sick. I didn’t start feeling hinky about the meeting until after Reever was in the car.”
“After it was too fucking late, you mean.”
“Yeah. Well, I didn’t think Reever’d feel quite so chatty around you.”
Cramer huffed. “Because he charged me with police brutality?”
“Twice.”
Cramer shrugged. “I’m okay, by the way. Thanks for asking. I been puking my guts out all day long, I have to run to shit, and my head feels like I got the fucking Budweiser Clydesdales line dancing in there.”
“Memere can’t fix you up?” asked Jake, grinning.
“Don’t go ragging on Memere. People laugh at her cures, but they still pay out the nose for her paket kongos and pot’et.”
Jake had only seen one pot’et—a strange white china pot filled with hair and nail clippings and a banana leaf wrapping leaking the burned and powdered remains of something Jake hadn’t wanted to know about. It rested in a place of honor in Memere’s living room. But Cramer had forced a paket kongo on him the first month they’d met.
“It don’t mean nothing,” Cramer had assured him, as Jake gingerly took the onion-shaped contraption—constructed of bright red cloth and what he guessed were chicken feathers—and placed it on a bookshelf, where Cramer had insisted it remain. “If it don’t work, fine. If it does, fine. What do you lose?”
Jake glanced in the bottle’s reflection. The paket was still on the shelf.
“You should have stayed in bed,” he said, staring into Cramer’s bleary eyes.
“And miss sitting up drinking with you in the middle of the night?” said Cramer, wiping the mouth of the bottle with his sleeve and taking a long drag. “Why don’t you answer your fucking phone?”
“Didn’t feel like talking,” said Jake, recalling the message he’d found on his answering machine from Pam. She must have called his apartment before reaching his cell phone. “Jake, I wish you’d come home. Please call.” She’d recited her number and hung up.
“I talked to Doc Miller,” said Cramer.
Jake’s eyebrows rose. Miller was the best pathologist in Houston. But Galveston had their own medical examiner. “Why Miller?”
“They called him down to look at the bodies.”
“He can’t have found out much so fast.”
“Enough.”
“What?”
“He said he couldn’t be sure just yet, but it looked like at least some of the wounds were self-inflicted. And the boys on the beach found most of the hardware those guys were carrying. They emptied their weapons. Probably at each other.”
Jake frowned, waiting.
“He also said they weren’t just shot. There were multiple contusions, abrasions, broken bones. They were run through a blender. You want to tell me your side of the story?”
Jake told him. When Cramer blinked twice he knew his friend didn’t believe everything he was hearing.
“That’s the way it happened,” insisted Jake.
Cramer’s eyes narrowed, but he just nodded, and they sat in silence for a while. When Cramer finally spoke again his normally raspy voice was soft as a whisper.
“Sometimes questions are better left unanswered.”
Jake chuckled mirthlessly. “You are such a closet philosopher.”
“That’s not to say that this is one of them. The department will eventually want to just forget the whole thing if you stick to your guns and they can’t close the case—not like they give a rat’s ass about a bunch of dead Torrio boys. But our friends in the media are going to be on you like stink on shit.”
Jake frowned, nodding. “I have nothing to tell them.”
“They won’t believe that.”
“Do you?”
Cramer leaned way back—making the chair groan ominously—and took another long swig from the bottle before res
ting it on the table again. He stared up at the black bowl of sky and frowned. “I have to believe what you tell me, I guess.”
“Thank you.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me.”
Jake tried to meet his eye but couldn’t.
“Don’t end up like me, Jake.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I’ve been watching you for years. You’re a good cop. Hell, you may be a great cop.”
“Bullshit.”
Cramer never gave out compliments. The statement sounded more like a deathbed confession, and it gave Jake the creeps.
“It’s not bullshit, and don’t interrupt me. You care about people. Maybe too much. And you get hunches that are downright spooky, even for me. But I’ve watched you in a lot of tight situations. You think too long before you get rough or go for your gun, like you want to make doubly or triply sure before reacting. I’ve never once seen you bust a cap, and you know damned well there have been situations that called for it.”
“I didn’t hesitate out there today,” said Jake miserably. “And I’d never let you down.”
“No. At least I’m still in one piece, and I never got shot because of you. But you scare me sometimes, Jake. I worry that I’m gonna get killed because you’re not up to pulling the trigger when you really need to.”
“Do you want another partner?”
Cramer sighed. “Did I say that? I’m forty-two, and I look fifty. Sometimes I feel sixty, and I probably won’t live to see it with you or without you, because I’ll keep doing this until I’m too damned old, too goddamned slow. But I won’t die because I was worried about hurting someone.”
“What about your paket kongo?” said Jake, smirking.
“The spirits don’t help the stupid,” said Cramer. “And doing what we do past our time is stupid. Happens to cops all the time. We lose our edge and then Gede comes to pass us on. He don’t care much whether we think it’s time or not.”
“Max Hartley’s sixty-one, and he’s one of the best detectives on the force.”
Cramer nodded. “Max has enough seniority to take only the cases he knows he can clear, the ones that won’t cost him any grief or blood. I can’t do that. Now shut the fuck up.”
Suddenly Cramer wasn’t talking like an old, eccentric uncle anymore. His voice was harsh again, and Jake heard real pain in it.
“I’ve never wanted to be anything but a big-city detective,” said Cramer, leaning even farther back in his chair and kicking his feet up on the balcony’s rail. “It’s the only thing in the world I’m good at. I tried having a wife. It didn’t work out.” He glanced at Jake. “I never mentioned her because there was nothing to tell. I had the job, and it meant more than the marriage. I think a good writer would say that I was a two-dimensional character. You’re not. You just want to be.”
“What exactly are you rattling on about?”
“You’re carrying a lot of baggage, and you need to fix it or forget it. In this business you make way too many enemies to be thinking about your past all the time or twitching when you should be shooting.”
“I never had any enemies that made me really nervous until the Torrios,” said Jake, stretching the truth to the breaking point.
“At the very least you’re going to get yourself killed. And I don’t want to watch it happen. I’m your friend, Jake. I don’t want to see you die.”
“Have I ever unloaded on you?”
Cramer shook his head. “That’s just it, you don’t have a past. So that tells me you have a lot of past. Eight people are dead on that beach, and apparently—instead of shooting you—half of them just decided to kill each other. The way I see it, you got a golden opportunity here. That graze you got on your shoulder and the investigation into the shooting will buy you a few days off if you want to take them instead of sitting behind a desk. You can spend the time putting whatever’s behind you behind you and turning yourself into a cardboard character like me, in which case you’ll make one hell of detective. Or you can find out what the hell is wrong with you and maybe figure out you don’t want to be a cop after all.”
“That’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard. I worked my ass off to get where I am.”
Cramer nodded. “I know you did. But were you working toward something or away from something?”
Jake felt as though Cramer had opened up a drawer filled with his most private thoughts. The only thing he hadn’t discovered was the box in the back, under the socks, the one labeled
DO NOT OPEN. INSANITY INSIDE.
“Can we cut to the chase here? I’d like to go to bed now.” “I read all the reports, and I spoke to every officer on the scene today. Every cop that was on that call thinks you know more than you’re saying.”
“I was in the fucking water! I couldn’t see a thing. Just what is it I’m supposed to know?”
Cramer shrugged. “I’ve got to be honest with you. You’re stretching your credibility with me, too. I’ll buy that you didn’t kill all those people. Hell, I don’t think anyone, including the medical examiner, would have any idea how you could have. But someone did, and you need to tell me who, and how . . . and why.”
“It happened like I said.”
“You have to admit that’s kind of hard to fathom. You claim you were in the water maybe five minutes max, and at least some of those guys were shooting at you most of that time.”
“I told the cops that they started shooting up and down the beach.”
“At each other.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Cramer, I know it sounds unbelievable. Maybe there was a mutiny in Torrio’s organization. Maybe some of them were Zino’s boys. But the story I told you, the story I told the Galveston boys, is gospel.”
Cramer sighed loudly. “But you definitely killed José Torrio?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Jimmy isn’t going to be pleased. The brothers are very tight. Or they were.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“It might be a good idea to take that vacation just to let things cool off.”
For a while silence reigned. Jake poured himself another dollop of liquor, but it tasted raw and unsavory. When Cramer finally spoke again his voice sounded hollow, airy and distant, and the pain in it was undeniably heartfelt.
“You going back to take care of business at home or not?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Jake.
Starlight reflected off the whites of Cramer’s eyes.
“You ought to answer your messages. Then people wouldn’t bother your sick partner. I think Sergeant McCallister would give out the pope’s number if a woman with a sweet-sounding voice asked for it.”
“Pam called you? What did she say?”
Cramer shrugged. “She takes after you. She didn’t volunteer a lot. But it’s amazing what you can wheedle out of someone in the space of a conversation if you listen good. How come you never told me your father killed your mother?”
Jake sighed. “That came up in a conversation about my uncle’s death?”
“When I said baggage I didn’t mean baggage. That’s why you left Maine?”
Jake nodded. That was as good an excuse as any.
“I’m really tired,” he said at last.
“Don’t you want to call your cousin?”
Jake tried to stare Cramer down. When that didn’t work he looked at his watch. “It’s five in the morning there.”
“Call her later,” said Cramer.
“All right. Now go home. You look like shit.”
“Thanks,” said Cramer, rising. “You don’t look half bad yourself.”
“Lock the goddamn door, and leave your key with me.”
Cramer chuckled, sliding the glass door to the balcony shut behind him.
RAMER PARKED HIS FORD SEDAN beside a rusted Volvo station wagon. Two of the streetlights were out, and the parking lot of Memere’s apartment buildin
g was filled with sinister shadows. But several windows were ablaze with light, and he knew from experience that those belonged to the meth-heads. This part of town had been okay when Memere had first moved in twenty years earlier. Now it was shady and dangerous, and Cramer hated that there was so little that he could do about it. Busting people like the Torrios might cut down on wholesale drugs in the city, but it wouldn’t touch the real pool of vice that never ran dry. Sometimes he felt like Hercules shoveling out the Augean stables. He slammed the car door loud enough to rustle a couple of curtains, knowing that the assholes were well aware he was a cop.
He checked the Glock under his arm, but he wasn’t expecting trouble. Most of the neighbors were as afraid of Memere as they were of him. He smiled, imagining strung-out dopers with God only knew what kind of armaments, terrified of an eighty-year-old woman who didn’t weigh ninety pounds soaking wet.
His footsteps echoed on the metal landing as he strolled to Memere’s door, peering across the flickering lights of the kidney-shaped pool at a couple of wired-up kids smoking pot. They turned in his direction, then went back to toking. He flipped through his key ring, found the master, and opened the dead bolt and then the door lock without knocking. The smell of peppermint incense blasted his nostrils, and he had to sniffle to keep from gagging. Memere was always trying something new.
A cedar post—the poto mitan, the cosmic axis of Memere’s temple that connected heaven and earth—reached all the way to the ceiling from the center of the living room rug. Several tall candles burned in saucers on the floor, and there was an intricate design laid out in cornmeal on a broad piece of canvas. A veve, this one the symbol for Cramer’s guardian, the machete-wielding Ogou. From the back bedroom he could hear a rattle, and he stepped carefully around the candles.
Memere wore a traditional, stark, white cotton shift, her gray hair pulled back tight against her skull. She leaned over one of the tiny alcoves filled with candles, tiny cups of rum and sweets, and small idols of each of the most important Voudou spirits. In her hand she held the ason, the sacred rattle. She was speaking to each of the spirits in low whispers, shaking the ason, and nodding to herself. But Cramer knew she was aware of his presence.
In Shadows Page 3